Siren Isle Is a Bit Boring

I'm a bit behind in terms of talking about what's new in retail, partially because I wanted to prioritise wrapping up my end-of-year summaries and my WoW Memories series, partially because what's been going on hasn't been terribly interesting to be honest.

War Within's patch 11.0.7 came out a month ago now; the husband and I didn't bother to even visit the new place that came with it until about two weeks later, and we were basically kind of bored with it after a single afternoon of playing there. I feel a bit bad saying this because I do appreciate the way Blizzard have been trying to give us these smaller content patches with world content between the larger ones since Dragonflight, and someone clearly tried to make the best of it by coming up with all these toys and gadgets that you get to play around with on the island but it just wasn't compelling to me at all.

The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is with the Forbidden Reach, which was 10.0.7's "patch island", but still managed to have quite a bit more going on. Most importantly for me, it was an actual part of the Dragon Isles that was connected to the expansion both in terms of lore and land mass - you could fly there straight from the Waking Shores without a loading screen. Comparatively, Siren Isle is tiny and nobody really knows where it is, as you get there by talking to a goblin on a zeppelin and bam, one short loading screen later you've arrived.

You can't fly on Siren Isle, and to be honest it wouldn't make sense to do so because you'd barely be able to lift off without already overshooting it. (Edit: I just read that we'll unlock it in another two weeks, but to be honest that still feels a bit pointless.) It's a tiny, barren piece of rock without any gathering nodes and barely even any plants and animals. I read somewhere that it was actually created from an Island Expedition map built during BfA that the devs didn't end up using back then. That certainly explains why it feels so disconnected from the rest of Khaz Algar and has dead Kul Tirans on it.

When we first arrived it actually seemed crazy busy because there were constant NPC shouts all around us, but we quickly learned that the three rotating mini bosses just come with a lot of noise attached. Beyond that there are just some weeklies that basically ask you to run around the isle and kill everything in sight for twenty minutes. Woo.

Like I said, I actually feel a bit bad about being so "ungrateful" for this new content, but it's just kind of underwhelming for what it is. I guess I appreciate that the new ring with unique gems (a feature that I didn't love in the Forbidden Reach either and could've done without) at least doesn't come with quite the same level of inventory clutter as the last one.

WoW Memories #14: January 16th, 2007

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on January 16th, 2007 under the title "Burning Crusade!": 

So today was WoW expansion day! We saw the first Blood Elves being made at midnight¹, but that was about the most exciting thing that happened then. (Though we were all surprised that the servers didn't collapse right away.) I had preordered my own copy of Burning Crusade from Amazon but didn't expect it to arrive on release day, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found a parcel in the hall when I came home from uni this afternoon.

Installing it was quite annoying though. The installer froze up every time it reached the point where I was supposed to insert the second CD, but fortunately for me plenty of other people had the same problem and there was a thread on the support forum telling people that copying the CD contents and installing from the hard disk would circumvent the problem. Of course I had to reinstall two patches after that while my internet connection was extremely erratic and kept cutting off every other minute, so...²

Don't really have that much to say about the new content yet. I didn't much fancy questing in Outland alone, though I did eventually go through the Dark Portal after a friend kept linking me to some of the new items. I hadn't quite believed Mecha when he predicted that there'd be greens in Outland better than the old epic stuff, but it looks like he was right. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw the green wand you get as reward for one of the first quests I accepted...³

Also, Draenei > Blood Elves. From what I had seen of them on screenshots and such I thought that they were both nice-looking races but I didn't have any strong feelings about either. After fiddling around with the character editor for a bit however I really fell in love with the Draenei and their strangely twisted spines and legs (even if they walk funny) while the Blood Elves only struck me as pretty but bland.

I couldn't resist making a little Draenei mage of my own⁴, even if I don't know what I'm going to do with her and only got her to level six so far. The starting area was just so flooded with people fighting over quest mobs and spamming the chat that I couldn't stand it for long.⁵ Will see how long it takes for that to cool down.

¹ By that I meant that I was questing in Ashenvale on my tauren hunter and opening the /who window around midnight, constantly refreshing a "/who blood elf" query (or something like that) and watching the first results appear.

² Ah, the good old days of installing MMO expansions from physical media. Can't say I really miss that part.

³ I think that would've been the Desolation Rod. Doesn't look that impressive now with retail stats, but back then it probably had two or three times the number of whatever blue I'd last gotten in a Vanilla dungeon, so it seemed absolutely jaw-droppingly powerful.

⁴ That's this one!

⁵ This was actually kind of comforting to read because it shows that my disdain for the mega-server crowds that have come to dominate Classic is not just me being a grumpy old lady shaking her fist at the kids these days, but something that does go way back.

---

This seems like a good point to end this series for now, with the launch of the first expansion and the anniversary event in WoW also just having ended. This wasn't the last entry about WoW on my old personal blog, but they did become more irregular over time and also... changed a bit in nature I guess? A lot of posts were just random screenshots, and aside from marking some milestones that I was particularly proud of (such as when my guild cleared Gruul's Lair for the first time or when I got my first talbuk mount), they became more about my relationships with the people I was playing with than the game itself, and I'm not actually sure that would make for great material for this blog.

Not that I never talk about the people I play with nowadays, but a lot of those old posts definitely seem like "you had to be there" material on re-reading, such as when I talked about our GM tanking heroics for us late at night while drunk, or about how I met a shadow priest from another guild in real life and laughed at him while he threw up on the street. I might re-evaluate that at some point in the future, maybe when the Burning Crusade turns twenty or something. In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane; I hope you found at least some of it interesting!

Anniversary Success

After the bad pug story from a few days ago, today I have a tale of a good one! From retail even...?!

However, first things first: The big event for WoW's 20th anniversary finally came to an end this week. I wrote about what I thought of all the different activities involved back in early November, including the fact that currency payouts were initially very restricted. Once the devs fixed that, I kept collecting celebration tokens for about a month until I'd gotten everything I wanted, and then I kind of lost interest.

That was until someone reminded me at the end of my Christmas holidays that the event was almost over, and I decided that I'd probably like to still polish off the remaining achievements that I hadn't completed yet. These basically fell into two categories: Secrets of Azeroth and the BRD raid.

With the Secrets stuff, I'd done a few of the Guest Relations quests but stopped at some point because I'd found them too tedious to figure out. This time around I just looked up some guides and powered through everything that was left with instructions up on my second monitor. So many of these puzzles were just way too fiddly and obscure. Ticking all the boxes still took some time (the story quest about the feast recipe for the pirates was absolutely diabolical, especially if you didn't want to just buy all the ingredients off the AH) but I got there over the course of one day, finishing off my hunt for crates in the early hours of New Year's Day.

The issue with the raid was that I had done it multiple times on LFR, but the two achievements for it required you to go into areas where a raid finder group usually wouldn't go, so I figured my only chance to get them done was to join a normal mode pug. Even though I hadn't set foot into anything beyond LFR since mid-Cataclysm (not counting the craziness of Pandaria Remix), I strangely enough wasn't too worried about that, as I'd repeatedly heard from credible sources that normal mode raids these days aren't really much harder than LFR. I invited my husband into a party on New Year's Day and suggested that we look to join a BRD normal raid together.

We only had one problem: there wasn't a single listing for BRD that evening, just Nerub-ar Palace runs as far as the eye could see. So I decided to be brave and simply create my own raid. I named it "BRD normal full run" and set the description to: "Let's get those achievements!"

You might think this foolish, considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had faith that at least a couple of people willing to join our pug would know what to do and would speak up if we went grievously wrong. And... it worked out alright! After accepting absolutely everyone that applied over the next fifteen minutes or so, I realised that we were still a tank short, so I relogged from my evoker to my own prot warrior because I'm a glutton for punishment I guess I also had faith that the other tank would know what to do. First thing I did on zoning in was to hand them raid assist and they did seem to take charge quite happily, so all I had to do was help with rounding up adds, soak damage and taunt swap where appropriate.

We did have a couple of wipes, and one guy left after the first three bosses, but overall we progressed at a good clip, and my description had clearly attracted the right kind of people as at least half the raid piped up about missing the exact same parts of the achievements that we also needed and everyone gently herded each other towards them when we got to the right area.

It was also quite apparent that at least a few of our dps were even more clueless than I was (I'd at least watched a brief guide!), which usually became evident when someone was targeted by a soaking mechanic and ran for the hills to die alone in a corner instead of stacking up to survive. However, we were generally able to power through those losses just like you would in LFR, and the couple of times when things got too crazy and we wiped, someone did indeed speak up to inform us about just what had gone wrong, and people listened and did better next time. Everyone was friendly enough, and when we finished it was all "gg"s and thank yous.

I won't lie, I felt kind of proud that my first normal raid, my first pug raid, and my first raid organised by me - all rolled into one - went so well. Sometimes someone being willing to start the group is really all it takes.

When You're the Bad Pug (in RFD)

Last Sunday I healed a Razorfen Downs pug with my undead priest in Season of Discovery. It went... awkwardly.

I felt chipper enough when I first joined the group - I was filling the last spot, so we were immediately ready to go. The group had been listed for several dungeons, so I asked what the ultimate destination was meant to be and was told that it was Razorfen Downs. I could see that several people were already on their way to the entrance, and the tank was a warlock, which meant that I could simply await a summon, which was nice as I was very far away.

The tank asked whether we were all okay with doing the escort quest after the first boss, and I said "sure". I mostly took it as a given that the escort and its associated boss encounter would be included in an RFD run, but there's nothing wrong with making sure that everyone's on the same page! The warlock wasn't appeased that easily though - he insisted that each individual member confirmed in writing in the chat that they were okay with doing the escort, and that they would wait for everyone to hand in the previous quest before picking up the next one (the actual escort). A rather unexpected degree of paranoia I guess, but I wasn't put off just yet because I was well aware of how much of a pain that escort could be. (I mentioned it in this post from 2011!)

Anyway, eventually a summon arrived for me, and the moment I loaded in, someone shared the quest you can pick up just outside the instance with me. I thanked everyone around me and started buffing everyone with fortitude, something that still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD. I hadn't even buffed everyone yet when the tank was already off to the races - and thus began half an hour of me frantically chasing after him, trying to sit down to drink every now and then but barely getting above 20% of my mana at any given time.

At one point before we even got inside the instance, the tank died because he had charged so far off, I hadn't stood a snowball's chance in hell at getting in range of him in time. He put "mb" in the chat but didn't seem to learn a lesson from it as he still didn't slow down in any way the moment he was back on his feet. Eventually I did put "oom" in chat myself because I really wanted a moment to drink, but this still wasn't enough to stop the tank. One of the dpsers took pity on me and handed me a mana potion though. At one point we spotted a chest and a few people rolled on it - I won but again didn't have time to actually grab it because the tank was running and pulling again and I had to race after him in turn to keep him alive.

When we reached Belnistrasz, the tank was very firm that we should all "just accept, don't talk". Frazzled as I was from the constant running and barely being able to keep up, I quickly accepted the first quest, hit complete and then accepted the second quest, which immediately started the NPC running. "Who hit accept?!" the tank roared, and it took me a moment to process what had even happened. He'd said to just accept, not talk, which was what I'd done... but then I opened my quest log and could see that I was the only person on the escort quest. It was only then that it came back to me that of course, that's why it was so annoying, because there is no separate dialogue option to start the escort, it immediately starts the moment you accept the quest. Why had he said "just accept, don't talk" then though...?

Anyway, the tank kept demanding to know who'd ruined everything while we ran back to the entrance to reset the instance. I wanted to be honest and confess, but he seemed so mad, and someone else piped up with a comment along the lines "somebody probably had auto-accept on" (in an addon). I of course had no such addon installed, but the temptation of blaming an unspecified person's addon was just too great and I said nothing.

When we got outside, the tank again made each of us confirm individually that we didn't have any auto-accept function on (anymore) before resetting the instance. As we fought our way through the same bunch of pig people a second time, he also kept putting "alfa" in chat repeatedly. I didn't know what that meant, but already racked with guilt and nervous as I was, I worried that I was missing something important and eventually asked whether that was a SoD thing. Someone simply said yes and the tank repeated "alfa" a few more times. But who was he talking to? I searched Wowhead for "alfa" on my second screen and got no useful results. Was I doing something else wrong now? Fortunately it eventually turned out that it was the shaman he'd been pestering, namely for the buff "Spirit of the Alpha".

Anyway, we got back to Belnistraz again, and it was once again emphatically repeated not to start the escort quest until the tank officially called for it. I meekly hung my head and waited. When I noticed level-up type sparkles around people's heads as others handed in the pre-quest, I started to sweat again. What if people were paying attention and noticed that I wasn't visibly completing the pre-quest just now? Would that give away my bad deed from earlier? However, even as I wondered about that, I suddenly got the pop-up to say that someone else had started the escort quest and whether I wanted to accept it too. I clicked yes of course, and there was once again raging about how someone hadn't waited, though at least I knew it wasn't me this time. There was also no threat of a reset as only one guy had been unable to pick up the escort, and the tank was like "screw that one guy" I guess.

The silver lining of the run was that the boss at the end of the escort dropped Scroll of Shadowfiend for me, which I took with some delight. I had no idea you could even earn extra non-rune abilities like that too!

Anyway, we continued the run as before, crazy rushing included. One of the bosses dropped a really nice caster cloak, but I saw the tank roll need so I passed, guilty conscience still gnawing at me, plus I had got the distinct impression that this tank had very strong opinions about getting what he wanted.

He also died two more times on trash, even though I was able to keep everyone else alive. He hadn't run out of range either, I just... wasn't able to keep him up? He seemed to take crazy amounts of damage sometimes, but I have no experience with warlock tanks so I couldn't judge whether this was normal or whether he was effectively doing the warlock equivalent of tanking in battle stance and without a shield when you're under-levelled for the dungeon. I just felt like I was failing as a healer, even though nobody said anything. At one point after I'd resed him again, he just stood there for a minute not moving, and I imagined him telling his guild mates about how trash the healer in his RFD run was.

Eventually we got to the end of the dungeon. We ran past another chest, which nobody but me even attempted to roll for this time, so I just looted it after everyone else had left. Amnennar the Coldbringer dropped his Coldrage Dagger, on which the rogue in the party rolled need... but so did the warlock, and he was the one who won. The rogue just put a ":/" in chat, understandably not pleased with a caster needing on a melee weapon. I felt bad for him, but that last incident also made me feel a bit better about my own failures, knowing that the warlock wasn't just bossy and in a hurry but also a ninja. Didn't need to feel quite so bad about him dying then I guess.

I hearthed back to Undercity and did my quest hand-ins. I then opened the group finder one more time just to see what else was happening, and saw that the warlock was already in the process of forming another group for Scarlet Monastery, this time with a druid healer that was only level 33. I silently wished that guy good luck in my head and logged off for the day.

WoW Memories #13: December 25th, 2006 & January 14th, 2007

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

Today I'm combining two posts into a single entry since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on December 25th, 2006 under the title "Christmas Night":

As usual my Christmas Day was very non-Christmassy, cause by then the celebrating is over and everyone's just enjoying being a lazy bum.¹ In anticipation of Benny² forcing me to go to bed earlier than has become my habit I also decided to spend one more long night with my WoW friends before his arrival³, and I didn't regret it even though it involved lots of virtual death. Somehow it was all just too funny, I was constantly worried about waking someone with my laughter.

When I told Benny about this later the following conversation ensued:
Him: So you had like... a virtual stag night?
Me: Yeah, I guess.
Him: ...
Me: ...
Him: That's disturbing.
Me: Well, maybe, but knowing me... I could totally see my real hen night one day also...⁴
Him: DISTURBING!

Heehee.

The following was originally posted on January 14th, 2007 under the title "Moo! I'm A Cow!":

And I like synchronised dancing!⁵

Sorry, really didn't have anything informative to say today. ;-)

¹ In Austria (and many other European countries), the actual Christmas celebration takes place on Christmas Eve.

² My boyfriend at the time.

³ He was from the UK and as mentioned previously, I was still living in Austria myself. We had a long-distance relationship and tended to visit each other during school holidays, as we were both at university. Also, I kind of joke about it in this post, but me staying up late to play WoW was actually a point of contention between us more than once. He was a gamer but had no love for MMOs, and even though I tried to be quiet if staying up past his bedtime, me being on the computer in the same room that he was also sleeping in still woke him up more than once.

⁴ Actually, my real life hen do involved two friends from Austria taking me to an escape room. Not too crazy but good fun!

⁵ This marked the beginning of me slowly switching to Horde side (though I still continued to play Alliance too for quite some time). In the screenshot you see my hunter Pukaja on the left, and the other two are Matje on a shaman and Nemi on a druid. We'd at some point decided to make alts on Matje's main server, Earthen Ring, where he was also raiding as a resto druid. Nemi and I would eventually end up levelling all the way to cap and ended up joining his guild during early Burning Crusade, but I can't recall whether that was already on our minds back then. It might have been on Nemi's, who was always way more organised about these things and actually researching things like which classes were in demand. We didn't last long trying to level together in this setup as she quickly got away from me in levels, and Matje wasn't that invested in his shaman and soon lost interest from what I recall. While Nemi's druid ended up becoming her main on Horde side, I would later reroll as a troll priest (though I did eventually get Puka to level cap too).

Retail WoW & Me in 2024

Comparing the previous post and this one, I spent about two to three times as many hours in retail in 2024 than I spent in Classic. The uncertainty in the numbers mostly comes from the fact that I revived a lot of old characters this year for which I don't know how much of their /played actually happened in 2024 vs. ye olde days, but either way, the difference is pretty stark.

I just really enjoyed both the end of Dragonflight and the first few months of War Within. Aside from running dungeons with my guildies once a week, my play style tends to be somewhat on and off - I'll go through several weeks of binging quite hard and doing something or other on every single alt, to barely logging in outside of our scheduled dungeon runs for the next few weeks after. I know a lot of Classic players tend to think of retail as having lots of daily/weekly chores you "have" to do, but from my personal experience at least that's an image that's about two expansions out of date. Sure, there are lots of things you can do, especially as a more casual player, but I've found most of it to be very low pressure nowadays.

The two events that had the biggest impact on my stable of characters this year were MoP Remix, which resulted in me levelling five new characters to the level cap from scratch, and the introduction of Warbands with the War Within pre-patch, which suddenly gave long-forgotten characters relevance again now that cross-server and -faction play is almost fully supported and they all share an inventory via the warband bank.

Basically, aside from Shinfur the monk, all characters on this list that aren't on the Azjol-Nerub/Quel'Thalas server cluster were old favourites that got a revival this year.

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker (+10)
  
• 24 days, 13 hours /played (+9 days, 18 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 83 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 73 Cooking, 144 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): Dragon Isles Leatherworking 100 (+10), 129 Classic Skinning (+129), 61 Outland Skinning (+61), 75 Northrend Skinning (+19), 23 Cataclysm Skinning (+3), 85 Legion Skinning (+4), 30 Kul Tiran Skinning (+23), 30 Draenor Cooking (+15), 300 Classic Fishing (+267, had to level that for the fishing pole, lol), 10 Cataclysm Fishing (+5), 30 Kul Tiran Fishing (+15), 855 Archaeology (+756, I randomly decided to max it out one day but gave up because of how terrible the last 50 skill-ups are) 

My preservation evoker remained my main throughout Dragonflight. With War Within, I had a feeling early on that I'd probably want to change roles in group content but I wasn't entirely sure yet, so because making decisions is hard, I still ended up levelling this character through Khaz Algar first and did all the story content on her. When there isn't new story to check out though, she's mostly chilling now.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
  
• 4 days, 17 hours /played
• War Within professions: 83 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 36 Cooking, 48 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Blacksmithing, 295 Classic Mining, 13 Cataclysm Mining

The warrior I levelled during Remix ultimately ended up becoming my new "dungeon main" as I became the tank for our little group of friends doing M+ once a week. It's been... surprisingly chill? I mean, I only play with friends, not pugs, and we only do pretty low keys - I'm sure things become more demanding in high keys, but as it is, I'm finding it to be surprisingly low-stress. I learned to tank during Burning Crusade, where threat was a bitch and losing aggro on a single mob in a heroic could result in a dps or the healer getting insta-gibbed, so just pulling and AoEing things at a good clip while also rotating through my defensives doesn't feel very demanding in comparison.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest (+10)
  
• 8 days, 9 hours /played (+2 days, 23 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 65 Tailoring, 61 Enchanting, 21 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 300 Classic Tailoring (+200), 31 Northrend Tailoring (+26), 45 Cataclysm Tailoring (+43), 74 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+10), 15 Cataclysm Enchanting (+4), 21 Pandaria Enchanting (+1), 74 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+10), 39 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23), 59 Dragon Isles Fishing (+22)

My hobby priest continues to be just that: not my main and not really played a lot in group content, but I just like having a holy priest to do stuff on.

Hekatie - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 11 days, 23 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 71 Inscription, 31 Cooking, 42 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Herbalism, 75 Outland Herbalism, 75 Northrend Herbalism, 75 Cataclysm Herbalism, 300 Classic Inscription, 75 Outland Inscription, 75 Northrend Inscription, 75 Cataclysm Inscription, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 75 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 180 Archaeology

This was one of the old characters I revived after the Warband patch and levelled to 70 via the Radiant Echoes event (you can kind of tell her age based on her having all profession skills up to Cataclysm maxed out). I wasn't actually that keen on death knights when they first came out (the first three posts about them on this blog were all about how death knights suck, lol) but I did eventually manage to get this one levelled up by the end of Wrath and then continued to have some fun playing her in Cata. In TWW so far, frost death knight has been pretty fun to play too - I wrote more about that here.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter (+10)
  
• 4 days, 15 hours /played (+1 day, 21 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 56 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 26 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 140 Classic Leatherworking (+21), 42 Dragon Isles Leatherworking (+24), 6 Outland Skinning (+6), 75 Northrend Skinning (+5), 49 Legion Skinning (+16), 175 Classic Cooking (+46), 32 Dragon Isles Cooking (+18), 76 Classic Fishing (+76), 45 Northrend Fishing (+45), 46 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

I allowed my hunter to grow her hair out this year, but that's about as exciting as things got. I wrote more about my ambivalent relationship with retail hunters in this post. I'm also a bit worried about what the new year will bring as Blizzard is currently looking to take marksmanship hunters' pets away in 11.1, which is so utterly insane I don't even know how anyone could've thought that would be a good idea. There's still time to change course, Blizz!

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
  
• 1 day, 11 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 16 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 15 Classic Skinning

It's the druid I levelled in Remix. As mentioned in this post, she's kind of "my other tank" and I haven't done much with her other than level up her gathering skills and casually gear up a bit.

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
  
• 3 days, 14 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Mining, 55 Outland Mining, 3 Northrend Mining, 300 Classic Skinning, 74 Outland Skinning (I should really go get that last skill point), 12 Northrend Skinning, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 135 Classic Fishing, 50 Archaeology

This is another old alt that got revived. I created her way back in the day, just to stall out at level 15. I then revived her in Cataclysm to explore some of the revamped levelling zones. Her professions seem to indicate that I did also spend some time in early BC content, but I've got to admit that I have absolutely no memory of that. This year, I levelled her to 70 via Radiant Echoes, and I wrote about what it was like to level from 70-80 as holy in this post.

Shinfur - ER

• Level 80 pandaren monk
  
• 1 day, 4 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 83 Engineering, 6 Cooking, 4 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 6 Classic Cooking

It's the monk I levelled in Remix! You can read more about my monk experiences in War Within here. Not much else to say about this one, other than that thanks to the inventing mechanic, engineering is by far the easiest crafting profession to level for some reason.

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue (+10)
  
• 2 day, 22 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 87 Herbalism, 70 Skinning
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 267 Classic Herbalism (+8), 100 Dragon Isles Herbalism (+13), 184 Classic Skinning (+9), 43 Northrend Skinning, 33 Cataclysm Skinning (+10), 19 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 60 Dragon Isles Fishing (+25), 116 Archaeology (+9)

It's my rogue who I still don't particularly enjoy playing but hey, I need her to be able to open lockboxes. More about my experiences with rogueing in War Within can be found here.

Willowie - QT

• Level 74 human warlock
  
• 13 hours /played
• War Within professions: 48 Alchemy, 62 Herbalism
• Other professions: none

It's the warlock I levelled in Remix! I had to relog to take this screenshot because for some reason on the first attempt, the game had forgotten that she owns an incubus and was displaying the succubus instead. Now it's showing the correct pet but I don't know what's up with his wing appearing to go behind the tree in the background?! Small indie company, as the saying goes.

I was also shocked by how many herbs alchemy uses these days. I thought I had a good number of them saved up, but then I was like: "You want me to burn how many of these for each skill-up?!" I also still have no idea how to play this one and have died to random mobs that I aggroed while picking flowers. Part of me keeps thinking that I should just bite the bullet and look up a guide, but another part remains stubborn and maintains that if a class is this clunky to figure out, maybe it deserves to be played less. Make this nonsense easier to understand in game, Blizzard.

Mehg - AN

• Level 72 night elf demon hunter (+2)
  
• 10 days, 21 hours /played (+17 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 30 Mining, 25 Jewelcrafting
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 27 Cataclysm Mining (+10), 74 Legion Jewelcrafting (I don't think this is new, I must have forgotten to write down her old JC skills last year), 100 Shadowlands Jewelcrafting, 79 Dragon Isles Jewelcrafting (+10), 83 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 75 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

My demon hunter, who was my "main alt" in Shadowlands and remained one of my most played characters throughout early Dragonflight just quietly fell by the wayside towards the end of the expansion and I've only barely started levelling her in War Within. I'm not entirely sure why, though I think at least part of it was due to how much of a pain it was to sort out her inventory and the bazillion types of different ores and gems she'd accumulated over time. Once I also accidentally clicked the "clean up my bank" button and there are few things I've done in a game that I regretted as much as that one button click. I should be in a better place now though.

Shimeri - AN

• Level 70 dwarf shaman
  
• 4 days, 8 hours /played
• Professions: none

The shaman that was my "Remix main" has oddly ended up being the last of my Remix characters to get levelled in War Within, even though resto shaman is the healer flavour of the month right now. I'll get to it when I get to it.

Daerys - DS

• Level 70 draenei mage
  
• 30 days, 9 hours /played
• Professions: 300 Classic Mining, 75 Outland Mining, 75 Northrend Mining, 75 Cataclysm Mining, 305 Classic Jewelcrafting, 80 Outland Jewelcrafting, 70 Northrend Jewelcrafting, 32 Cataclysm Jewelcrafting, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 3 Northrend Fishing, 11 Cataclysm Fishing, 7 Archaeology

This used to be my "main Alliance alt" back in the day. I wrote a bit more about her history and how I ended up reviving her for the draenei heritage quest in this post. Again, you can kind of tell that this is an old character that saw a lot of play up to Wrath from the profession skills. I plan to take her to 80 eventually.

Shinlu - AN

• Level 68 human monk (+7)
  
• 22 days, 14 hours /played (+5 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 160 Kul Tiran Leatherworking (+10), 54 Northrend Skinning (+3), 100 Legion Skinning (+20), 29 Dragon Isles Skinning (+24), 63 Kul Tiran Cooking (+15), 16 Draenor Fishing, 690 Archaeology (+12)

My old Shadowlands main still hasn't really seen much love, but apparently gained seven levels in only five hours of play time, because that's how retail rolls these days. I remember trying out the follower dungeon feature on her when it came out, but other than that I don't think I did very much, though those profession skill-ups must have come from somewhere I guess.

Tidella - AN

• Level 54 Kul Tiran shaman (+6)
  
• 1 day, 21 hours /played (+4 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 77 Outland Mining (+77), 3 Outland Engineering (+3)

Similar story here, with six levels gained in four hours of play, all of which were me going on a mining spree in Outland because I was after some old mats for some reason at that particular moment.

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 19 human paladin
  
• 1 day, 22 hours /played
• Professions: 130 Classic Blacksmithing, 121 Classic Mining, 109 Classic Cooking, 97 Classic Fishing

This is the very first character I ever created, a paladin on a German server. Like several other old characters, I decided to take her out for a spin after the Warband patch. It's kind of funny that I remember her being in her mid-20s before the level squish, but post-squish she got to quest through some of the human starter zones all over again, which was a nice nostalgia trip even with all the post-Cataclysm changes.

Eartha - AN

• Level 26 earthen shaman
  
• 2 hours /played
• Professions: none

I wasn't that keen on the earthen when they were first announced, but I did end up liking them in the story, so after I'd unlocked them I decided to make one just for the heck of it. Also, they have a racial that gives a massive boost to exploration XP... but that's a topic for another post.

Classic WoW & Me in 2024

It's once again time for my by now annual look back at my relationship with WoW (Classic, there will be a separate post about retail), through the lens of which characters I've made any progress with this year and how much.

The main thing that immediately became apparent when I started putting the numbers together for this is that I spent a lot less time in Classic in 2024 than I did in 2023. Based on my 2023 review, about 50% less in fact. That still left me with more than ten days /played, which is not nothing, but for comparison: in 2019, the year when Classic first came out, I spent more time than that on a single character over the course of only four months.

When I did play Classic, my focus this year has generally been on rolling up new characters for novelty, with the occasional check-in on old favourites for some routine gameplay or the odd adventure here or there.

Season of Discovery

I'm going to start with Season of Discovery, which got the largest chunk of my play time as far as I can tell, though the numbers might be a little skewed as I'm pretty sure I created most of these characters at the end of last year and they just hadn't reached a high enough level yet for me to want to include them in my end-of-year round-up. I then still played quite intensely for the first two months or so of 2024, before getting utterly disenchanted with the state of SoD and giving up on it. It wasn't until the other month that I felt inspired to dip back in, but it's actually been quite nice to get to the party late and not feel like I have to give a fig about whatever's going on at endgame.

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 37 Priest
• 2 days, 23 hours played (+1 day, 11 hours)
  
• 188 Alchemy (+48), 205 Herbalism (+55), 204 Cooking (+54), 201 First Aid (+72), 174 Fishing (+52)

Raiding in SoD phase one, even if only did BFD twice or something, turned out to be an unexpected boon as I reckon the gear my priest got from it might well last her until the level cap at this point. She's currently leading the charge of my alt brigade with the goal of seeing Demon Fall Canyon some time next year.

Shintroll - WG

• Level 35 Hunter
  
• 1 day, 21 hours played
• 154 Leatherworking, 225 Skinning, 205 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 153 Fishing 

My hunter is an interesting contrast to this because she hit level 25 only just before phase two came out and has been wearing mostly the same greens since then. Levels come fast with the XP boost, but gear not so much. It's starting to become somewhat noticeable at this point, but fortunately hunters are sufficiently OP that she's still managing to get by.

Shindig - WG

• Level 28 Mage
  
• 1 day played
• 98 Enchanting, 125 Tailoring, 103 Cooking, 75 First Aid, 75 Fishing

Mages have an interesting concept going on in SoD with all the books you can find and the scrolls you can decipher, but sadly most of them haven't seemed particularly useful to me so far. We'll see whether that changes at some point.

Shikana - WG

• Level 24 Shaman
  
• 18 hours played
  
• 129 Engineering, 111 Mining, 103 Cooking, 77 First Aid, 91 Fishing

I think I created this shaman with the goal of trying out shaman tanking, but with the changes to runes I'm now too worried about being considered "suboptimal" for group content without all my runes purchased from the vendor. This was very much driven home when I did a Ragefire Chasm on another character with a shaman healer who was only level 8 (TIL that you can enter RFC at level 8; I always thought the minimum was 10) and he basically did all his healing with spells from runes. Her gear is also starting to fall behind rapidly and I'm thinking I may have to take some time out just to hunt down both some gear and runes.

Shinlu - WG

• Level 21 Druid
  
• 1 day, 12 hours played
• 89 Herbalism, 90 Skinning, 71 Cooking, 52 First Aid, 34 Fishing

This druid hasn't had a chance to do much yet... I think I've only found something like four runes so far as well. Much work to do either way.

Tirr - Lava Lash 

• Level 32 Priest
• 1 day, 19 hours played
• 104 Enchanting, 140 Tailoring, 180 Cooking, 114 First Aid, 205 Fishing

This was the character I made on the RP server with the goal of "rerolling" there for phase two, just for the server to die the "free transfer death" shortly after. I was honestly surprised to see that it was still up when I logged back in last month. I did a bit of solo questing there, but a completely empty world doesn't hold that much appeal to me right now. That was a fun experiment last year, but for the time being I'm kinda over it. 

Hardcore

Shintar - Nek'Rosh

• Level 22 Priest
• 23 hours played
  
• 96 Alchemy, 140 Herbalism, 100 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 136 Fishing 

While hardcore isn't really my (primary) jam, I did decide to revisit it briefly in spring by creating a priest on Horde side this time around. That character is actually still alive, I just lost interest in the low 20s as I so often do because I felt I should run Wailing Caverns for the quests but also struggled to find a group until my interest just kind of fizzled out.

Classic era - Alliance

Tirr - Zandalar Tribe

• Level 20 Hunter
  
• 22 hours played
  
• 141 Herbalism, 101 Skinning, 136 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 140 Fishing 

The most invested I got into Classic era this year was probably when I checked out the "community fresh" project on Zandalar Tribe in summer. Even so, that still resulted in less than a day of play time from me, so that should give you an idea of how inactive I've been on era in general this year. Also, when I logged in to check this character's /played, there were only two other people online on the entire server. No need for "community fresh" when there are actual Blizzard-run fresh anniversary servers.

My existing Alliance characters saw a little bit of... not really play, but active time as I started making money over on Alliance side at one point. Earlier in the year, a guildie needed help transferring an expensive recipe from Alliance side to Horde via the neutral AH and I was happy to help him out. He reimbursed me of course, but the whole thing did make me realise how poor my Alliance characters were in comparison to my Hordies, so I decided to try and make some easy money by actually regularly using my cooldowns to refine Deeprock Salt and create Mooncloth. Nothing to write home about, but I'm just going to list the overall stats in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 9 hours played (+3 hours)
  
• Sarelle - NK: 20 days, 14 hours played (+1 hour)
• Faly - NK: 8 days, 22 hours played (+1 hour), 292 Cooking, 225 Fishing
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 16 hours played (+3 hours), 300 Tailoring (+5, from making Mooncloth), 252 Enchanting (+2), 281 Cooking, 122 Fishing
• Razorr - Pyrewood Village: 2 days, 8 hours played (+4 hours... I have no idea what I did in that time as she gained no levels or skill-ups - it's possible I just made a mistake in my calculations last time), 160 Mining, 235 Skinning, 162 Cooking, 196 First Aid, 65 Fishing
• Shintar - PV: 2 days played (+0), 125 Mining, 172 Engineering, 181 Cooking, 145 First Aid, 126 Fishing

Classic era - Horde

Shintau - PV

• Level 56 Shaman (+3)
• 8 days, 18 hours played (+19 hours)
  
• 268 (Tribal) Leatherworking (+3)

My only Horde character to achieve anything noteworthy this year was my shaman, who gained three levels. Still not 60 after more than five years though, hah! I just did a bit of questing and ran both Sunken Temple and Maraudon. The Mara run didn't give me much XP, but it allowed me to play with a friend from OG Classic that had finally decided to start playing on era and we had a good time.

The rest of my stable didn't do much either, so again I'll just list them in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Shika - PV: 33 days, 16 hours played (+1 day, 5 hours) - I think I may have attended one or two raids at some point in the year, I got to be part of Bracken's Atiesh adventure, and I did spend some time farming ore on occasion. Mostly I just logged in to put stuff on the AH though.
  
• Shilu - PV: 16 days, 7 hours played (+3 hours) - I don't even remember what I did on this one
  
• Shinny - PV: 4 days, 14 hours played (+10 hours) - my mage appears to have lost two levels since I wrote down that she was level 44 last year, and she's only 42 now; as this isn't Everquest it seems safe to say that was just me getting it wrong. She maxed out her tailoring due to me deciding to regularly craft and sell Mooncloth on Horde side as well: 300 Tailoring (+12), 143 Enchanting, 272 Cooking, 263 First Aid (+7), 178 Fishing (+1)
  
• Fooba - Mirage Raceway: 1 day, 12 hours played (+1 hour), 133 Mining, 97 Blacksmithing (-27? clearly another mistake in my notes last year), 76 Cooking (+56), 110 First Aid (+17), 77 Fishing (+70)
  
• Gemba - MR: 1 day, 4 hours played (+0), 97 Herbalism, 150 Skinning, 2 Cooking, 113 First Aid, 80 Fishing 

Once again I'm ending the year with no real idea of what next year will bring for me in Classic. Season of Discovery has given me some goals for the time being but that mode has a very uncertain future. I might revisit Hardcore again at some point, but beyond that I have no real plans, so my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me.